Free Range Keyboard

Fall TV 2011 (Part 2)

2 Broke Girls (revisit) – The second episode pretty much confirmed the first: a couple of funny moments, but overall mediocre.I went ahead and gave it the boot from my PVR. It’s certainly terrible, it’s just that there are only so many hours in the day to watch TV, even for me.

Person of Interest – Hmmm. Interesting. I was a little wary of this, and still am, for a couple of political reasons. I was concerned that the show would attempt to justify our society’s loss of privacy to the alter of “safety”. Unfortunately, I wasn’t too far off the mark. These people attempting to do “good” things are utilizing the most invasive big brother technology possible, albeit in an unauthorized manner. The underlying message is, of course, how much better off we’d be if we allowed such transgressions by our government or some other entity that knows what’s best for us. Utter poppycock of course, but Hollywood is the liberal center of the universe, so it’s no surprise they’d be all for this. They may yet turn it around with some sub plot about the abuse of such awesome power, but so far no hint of that. In any case, I do like the main character. A good guy, but a rather brutal one. The first episode was entertaining so I’ll definitely keep following it.

Up All Night -  I somehow missed this from my recording schedule but I managed to grab the episodes I missed and am now caught up. It has it’s charm and I really like Christina Applegate and Will Arnett in general, but I’m not sure I’m into this one enough to keep it around. I’m not much of a Maya Rudolph fan (I even had to look up here name) and she does a good job of tainting the rest of the case here. Anyway, I’ll probably give it another episode and decide from there. 

Suburgatory – This has promise, although through the first three quarters of the show, I wasn’t so sure. Perhaps I’m just being a little defensive as suburb dweller myself, but the initial portrayal of the suburbs as literally the “worst” place on earth was over the top and kind of a turn off. In the last five minutes, though, it kind of redeemed itself… but not by much. It’s weird. The two main a characters, the father and the daughter, were both great. Tessa was interesting and had a little attitude but still came off a nice person. Jeremy Sisto pull off the slightly overprotective but loving dad perfectly, while still managing not to be the “dork dad”. I’m a big fan of Cheryl Hines. I hope here character gets a little more depth as was hinted at near the end of the episode.

Prime Suspect -  I liked it. There was a great amount of character development without it getting too bogged down in the same. I liked that you got to see so many sides of the same person. The strong Detective on the job; the woman in a man’s world worried about her career; the girlfriend with her boyfriends custody issues. I hope that this level of character development wasn’t just for the first episode.

TV Shows - Rip to Rename

(aka there has to be a better way!)

I have a lot of TV Shows on DVD and Blu-Ray. Now that I have XBMC setup, I’d like to make these shows available without having to pull a disc out of the closet and pop it into a noisy drive. The basic principle of what I want to do is rip the episodes from the disc, rename them to a format that XMBC can easily work with, and then insert them into the XBMC library. One would think there would be a very straightforward and automated way to do this, but apparently that’s not so. It’s certainly possible, but there are a lot manual steps in the middle. I’m trying to eliminate as many of those manual steps as possible. It’s still a work in progress, but I’ll describe where I am so far.

1) Rip – There’s really no way to automate this step. You have to put each disc in the drive and pull the contents off. The best you can do is pull them off in a format that make the next steps a little easier. I’m not going to go into detail about ripping. There are plenty of guides on the internet for that. What I eventually end up with is something like this:

Show
--d1
----title1.mkv
----title2.mkv
----title3.mkv
--d2
----title1.mkv
----title2.mkv
----title3.mkv

 

2) Initial Rename – There are tools out there that will perform a lot of the renaming automatically. I’d love to find a tool that would allow me to simply feed it a list of manually ordered files, tell it what show and season those files are supposed to be for, and then have it just go off and do the renaming from there. So far I haven’t found a tool like that. The tools I have found require at least some meta information in the names of the files before they will work. So, to setup this initial information, I use Bulk Rename Utility (BRE). The process for this fairly easy:

1. Go to the parent “show” directory for a season of episodes in Windows Explorer (assuming Windows 7).
2. Do a search from that directory for *.mkv
   
   
3. Sort the results on the folder they were found in (i.e. D1, d2, etc.). This should get you a list of episodes in the correct order.
4. Drag the files from the Windows explorer to the main BRE window. BRE has the unfortunate tendency to reverse the order of the dragged in files. Keep an eye out for that and adjust the following instructions as necessary. I’m going to write the instructions as if BRE did reverse the files, because it almost always does so for me.
5. If you don’t know the “proper” name of your television series, go the thetvdb.com and look it up. Most are pretty obvious. For the purposes of this example, we’ll call our show “My Tv Show”.
6. In BRE box #3, type “title” in the “Replace” box and “My Tv Show 01x” in the “With” box. Change “01” to match whatever season you are renaming.
7. Make sure BRE box #5 is checked and up the “Last n” number to 2. If you select one or more of the files in the top window, you can see what the resulting rename would look like. It should be something like “My Tv Show 01x.mkv” at this point.
8. Put a check in BRE box #10. Again, assuming the files were reversed when put into BRE set the “Incre.” field to “-1” and then set the “Start” field to the number of files you have present. Set the “Mode” to be “Suffix” and the “Pad” to “2”.
9. All of this should result in a rename that looks something like “My Tv Show 01x01.mkv”. Naturally you may have to fiddle with this if there are combined episodes (Star Trek The Next Generation Episode Season 1 ep. 1 and 2 comes to mind). The good news is that you can save all of the work you just did as a BRE configuration file and in the future, you should only need to change the TV show name and the “start” point for the numbering.
10. Back in Windows explorer, perform the same search for *.mkv. You should now find the newly renamed shows. Select them all and ctrl-x them, then navigate to the parent directory of the discs and paste all of the mkv’s into one directory. You can delete the “dx” directories now, if you’d like.
11. Start up TVRenamer and lets change some setting under the “options” tab. You know, I don’t’ actually remember which options I changed from the default, so I’ll just include some screen shots of my settings for each section. The only one I do remember heavily customizing was the Naming Options section. So….
    General
     
    Detection – No changes; nothing checked
    Episode Titles – I don’t know why TVRage is selected, but it seems to work well
    
    Naming Options – I used a custom format based on the one Sick Beard uses for it’s downloads
    
    Aliases & Preserved Tags – I don’t’ use this, but it might be helpful to you.
    Subtitles – Again, I don’t’ use this as I pull the subtitles from the discs that I am ripping.
    
12. Now, that the options are set, back in “Raname” tab, in the “1st Step” area, browse to the folder where the shows episodes are.
13. If you named the files with a matchable name from TheTVDB.com site, you should now be able to go to the “2nd Step” box and click the button “Look up titles online”. It will take a minute to respond. When it does, the possible show options will be presented in the 2nd drop down box. Select the appropriate one and click “Use this name”.
14. Finally, click Rename. The episodes should be renamed and put into a “Season xx” folder.
15. At this point all you have to do is create an appropriately named show folder where you keep you media files for XBMC and put the “Season xx” folder in it. To get the appropriate fanart and images, I just open XBMC and tell it to update the library. There’s probably a better way to get that stuff, but this seems to work well enough. UPDATE: Well, I said scraping via XBMC directly was “good enough” because I would have sworn that doing so stored the thumbnails and show art with the video files themselves, but I guess I’m wrong about that. I haven’t found a “perfect tool” for this yet, but Ember Media Manager Revisited seems decent enough. Yet another manual step unfortunately.

As I said above, this is far too manual of a process, but it’s the best I have for now. I love to find a better way to do this, and I will definitely keep looking or maybe even write my own little utility for this specific purpose.

Fall TV 2011 (Part 1)

This is going to reveal my rather sad addiction to television, but I figured I’d offer up a few short impressions of the shows premiering last week. I haven’t watched everything, especially the dramas, but I’ll post about them once I have:

2 Broke Girls – Not a terrible pilot, but definitely the weakest premier out of the new slate of sitcoms I watched. Max is an interesting character. The other girl? Not so much.

How I Met Your Mother – This continues to be good. I’m not a fan of the time jumping narrative where it goes back and forth a lot between the future (where he’s talking to his kids) and the present (the main storyline timeframe). The premier was even worse because there was a third timeline; some point between the two involving Barney’s wedding. Ugggg. Just focus on the present, ok. Frankly, I’d be fine if they dropped the “talking to the kids” thing altogether. Still. it’s a funny show and if you watch it, you’re probably so invested in the characters at this point that these little things don’t end up mattering much.

Two and a half Men – I haven’t really followed this much for a few years, but I went ahead and recorded the premier. I’m glad I did. Charlie’s funeral was a riot. Seriously. No restraint was shown at all, and that’s what made it great. Ashton Kutcher’s character was entertaining, but not quite all there just yet. I assume he’ll settle into the role soon enough. I’ll probably put this one back on my regular recording schedule.

New Girl – This was pretty good, but a little schizophrenic. Zooey Deschanel was off the charts: funny, charming, cute, a little over the top but still believable. The three guy roommates were just all over the place; over the top in the not-so-believable way (a la Happy Endings) and oddly inconsistent. Still, it was fun and “Jess” was reason to enough to keep following this; at least for a while.

Raising Hope – I’m so glad this got renewed. It’s not one of those “must see” shows that you rush to watch either live or immediately after it’s recorded, but it’s always funny and the characters in it have been amazingly consistent and well defined from the start.

The Middle – This is another one just like Raising Hope. Great characters and good writing. I’m not sure how anyone could watch this and not see at least a little of their own family’s craziness in it.This season’s premier was classic.

The Big Bang Theory – Not much to say here. If you like this show, you’ll like the premiere.

Whitney – This was my favorite of the new sitcoms so far. Unlike many premieres, especially sitcoms, the pilot was polished and the characters seemed already well established; even most of the co stars. Whitney Cummins was hilarious. My only complaint, and it’s probably an odd one, is that they went a little overboard with risqué nurse’s costume. Seriously, there was NOTHING left to the imagination with that skirt. It could have been six inches longer and not affected the scene whatsoever. I understand that a lot of these adult oriented sitcoms are going to have jokes and even language that make them a little inappropriate for kids, but usually you can at least have the show running with the kids in the same house. If what we saw in the premiere is going to be the norm, then Whitney will definitely be an “after the kids are in bed” kind of show. And that’s too bad.

NCIS – I’m not nearly as enthralled with this show as a lot of other folks, but I’ve been watching it long enough that I kind of just want to see what will happen to the characters. The premier was pretty standard fare for the show. The grand conspiracies of the last few seasons are a little tired in my book, but as shows age, they all seem to fall into this pattern (of course some start with it). A new conspiracy, linked loosely with the old ones, was introduced. <Yawn>.

Nikita – This show is my guilty pleasure. I eat this up as soon as it’s recorded. I was a little disappointed to see the direction they were taking Alex’s character at the end of last season, and unfortunately the premiere continues the trend. Her and Nikita’s relationship was one the strengths of the show. I guess they’re trying to have the same thing with Michael’s character instead of Alex, but it’s not the same. We get see lovers in every show; a mentor-student bond with the trust needed in such a relationship was much more interesting.  In any case, the premier put in place the structures that will apparently be followed this season and all in all, it was pretty good, even if some of the premises were a little shaky.

That’s it. I have a ton of other shows recorded including a bunch of new dramas. I’ll put up some thoughts as I watch them.

XBMC Client Setup

I started with Linux here. It actually worked quite well. Compared to my later efforts to do the same on Windows, the initial 90% of the Linux (Ubuntu) setup required far less initial tinkering. It’s that last 10% that finally prompted me to try a different approach.

I think many, if not most folks would have been happy with the 90% success I had with the Linux setup. There was almost no tinkering with drivers or text based setup files. You just add a few repositories to the software manager and boom, XBMC is running great using hardware acceleration on Nvidia graphics drivers.

There were two factors that led me to experiment with a Windows 7 approach instead. First, there was a little bit of tearing in a few of the videos I played. Simply setting the XBMC vertical sync setting didn’t fix it. I’m 100% positive that some tinkering with some setting somewhere in either Ubuntu’s or XBMC’s settings would have solved it; however I was running XBMC on my main gaming box (Windows 7) as well for testing and I knew that there was no tearing there as long as you enabled the vsync option. If this were the only thing causing me a problem, I might have invested the time to fix it, but I was also not completely satisfied with my remote control option. I had purchased a flirc and while the setup of the flirc was every bit as easy as they advertised, I was getting laggy response in XBMC UI with it. This was probably more due to my remote control than (Hamony One) settings than with the flirc, but again, I just wasn’t sure I wanted to spend the time needed to figure out out if a Windows solution might just work out of the box.

As I would later discover, the remote control stuff would turn out to be every bit as much of a problem in Windows, but I didn’t know that at the time.

I already had a few free licenses of WIndows 7 laying around, so I decided to give it a shot. It shouldn’t be this way, but fully installing Windows is quite a bit more time consuming than Linux:

1. Install the OS – long time
2. Install the chipset and ethernet driver from the motherboard CD – short time
3. Update Windows – long time
4. Update Windows again; this update includes SP1 – very long time
5. Update Windows again (yes, really); this update includes IE 9 – long time
6. Install newest Nvidia drivers and XBMC

Ubuntu can be brought to the same state in literally 10% of the time. I know that if I had a slipsteam install disc (one that includes most of the Windows 7 updates) I could reduce this install time, but I don’t have such a disc, so I’m out of luck.

Finally with everything installed, XBMC runs like butter and plays back video beautifully straight from my NAS drives. Time to get the remote control working. I start with flirc. It works pretty well, but I can’t get it to put the machine to sleep with on button. This isn’t too big of a deal, as I could use EventGhost to fix this. The big problem is that I can’t get flirc to wake the machine from sleep. I tried a few things and left a post in an XBMC forum thread that the flirc developer frequents. If I can ever get this working, then I’ll probably give this device another shot because other than this one issue, it’s a sweet, sweet, little device that works exactly like I would want it to.

I have an old USB-UIRT from my Sage TV days. It’s a very powerful device that with enough work, can do just about anything. Or so I thought. Apparently, the best (perhaps only) way to get the USB-UIRT working with XBMC is via EventGhost, so I went through and setup the XBMC events to listen for signals from the USB-UIRT. It certainly does technically work, however again, my issue here was with lag in the XBMC UI. I tried a number of different profiles on my Harmony remote, and auto-repeat settings for EventGhost suggested by posters on the XBMC forums, but I just couldn’t get it working as I felt it should.

I spent some more time in the forums and after some reading, it seems like the simplest way to get perfect responsiveness from the UI and 100 control over sleep and wake, is to use a certified Media Center Edition IR receiver. There are a number of suggested models on the forums but everything is through eBay or surplus OEM suppliers. I decided to hit up Fry’s in the hope that they’ve have something to fit the bill.

Well….. they almost did.

The only thing they had was a “certified” SIIG MCE remote and receiver for Vista. While this wasn’t on any of the “recommended” lists in the XBMC forums, I hoped that was just because it wasn’t very common. No such luck, unfortunately. The good news is that if I plugged in the USB IR receiver, Windows 7 immediately recognized it and installed the driver with no hassles. Even better, using the supplied remote, the XBMC UI was snappy and responsive and the computer would sleep and wake with no problems whatsoever. The kicker, though, was that no matter what profile I tried in the Harmony remote, I couldn’t get the IR receiver to recognize signals from it. I tried every profile I could think of and that was suggested on the forums: MCE Keyboard, MCE Remote, and MCE SE remote. Nothing worked. I finally caved and bought one of the suggested HP MCE Remote Receivers from an ebay seller. So much for instant gratification. I’m awaiting it’s arrival, and when it does get here, I’ll report back. All in all, with the flirc, the useless SIIG remote/receiver, and the HP one, I’ve spent around $90 on remote control hardware. Bleh! What a waste.

In my next post, I’ll dig a bit into media management. This is topic that is well covered on the XBMC forums, so I won’t go into any great detail, but there are a few things I want to mention that might help the next guy.

NAS Software Setup

We (my friend Rob Matthews and I) decided to install Ubuntu desktop edition on the NAS. I lobbied for the server edition, but he overruled me (how did he do that when it was my machine?). I suppose he’s right. It doesn’t add much overhead and there’s plenty of space on the boot drive (an old first gen Intel SSD I had laying around).

 

Data Storage

So we installed Ubuntu. It came right up. There were no driver or display issues. Everything just worked. Next we plugged in the already physically installed platter hard drives. I have three 2Tb Hitachi Coolspin drives. Again, no problems. I’ve debated long and hard about how to configure these drives. I simply don’t need the speed of an expensive hardware RAID solution. Software OS RAID like mdadm is fine, but I’m a little leery about the not being able to read my drive one’s it’s out of that RAID environment. I know there are ways around that, but seeing as how I don’t actually need the throughput that such a configuration might provide, it’s hard to justify the potential drawbacks. You can tell by the fact that I’ve installed Ubuntu that I’ve already rejected NAS-as-the-system solutions like FreeNAS or Unraid. I actually like Unraid quite a bit, but I want an easy to configure and well documented server environment as well as a NAS for this machine. This leads to me to what I ended up trying: FlexRAID.

Although this was all a little fuzzy when I started out, I now understand FlexRAID consists of two major pieces. One is for data protection, and the other is for data access. The data protection part is what they refer to in the documentation as the “RAID” part. In my case, this meant setting up two of my drives as data drives and the other as a parity drive. FlaexRAID software is really quite simple in concept. The data protection piece isn’t a wrapper that you go through to access your data. It simply protects your data using one of several engines. You can still access your data just like you would if FlexRAID weren’t installed and running at all. All in all, the data protection side of FlexRAID was pretty very easy to setup. We’ll see how it works in the long run, but I see no reason why it shouldn’t perform as expected.

The other part of FlexRAID is data access. It will create what it calls “Storage Pools” and allow you to access your various data stores as one large store. I had a few problems with this. Setting it up was, again, quite easy, but as is sometimes the case on Linux, the file and directory permissions became a bugger. I never could get it working the way I wanted. fortunately, getting this working was far less important than the protection side, so I just left a message on their forums asking for advice and moved on.

 

Helper Apps

I decided to setup Sickbeard and SABnzbd as companions to my normal Dish Network PVR. I’m not going to go into a lot of detail, but these apps are used for downloading TV shows from the internet. While I have no intention of using XBMC as a my main PVR, there are a number of times when I would like to be recording three things at once but my Dish PVR only allows for two. Sickbeard and SABnzbd will allow me to supplement my normal PVR during those occasions. These apps were surprisingly easy to setup and they seem to work well.

 

Samba

Ahh Samba. My old nemesis returns. Damn you!!

Now that I’ve got that out of my system. Obviously a NAS is intended to store data that is will be used by other computers on the network, so there has to be a way for it to share that data. I love NFS. Seriously. Love it. It’s easy, fast, and super, super simple to setup between *nix systems, but most of the clients that would be reading and writing to the NAS would be Windows machines. There are some Windows NFS clients but they’re clunky and awkward at best. This all leads to Samba, the Linux software for creating and accessing SMB (i.e. Windows) data share . Sometimes is a treat. There have been times when I’ve set it up and slam, bam, thank you ma’am, I’m done and good in 10 minutes. But there are also times, and this was one of them, where it is a multi-day struggle.

My needs were simple, or so I thought. This NAS is on my local home network. Frankly, I’m the only one who’s going to be using it. I wanted it readable and writable with no password. Simple, right? Yeah.

I started with the GUI based configuration tools. I was curious as to how well these had progressed since the last time I tried them. Unfortunately, they seemed to be a pretty thin veneer over the normal Samba configuration options. That’s actually ok, but in my case, I ran into an error almost immediately. I didn’t spend much time looking into it; I just jumped directly to /etc/samba.smb.conf.

I followed the guides that should have allowed me to do what I wanted, but none worked. I could create shares, but the only way I could access them from other systems was to set them as password protected. I almost just gave up and went with this, and I would have except that Windows has the most annoying behaviors when dealing with password protected Samba shares. It constantly asks for the usernames and passwords even if you tell it save them and even when you submit the correct information, it doesn’t accept it and keeps popping up the username/password box. If you cancel the box you can access the drive because the username and password you submitted the first time was correct.

Anyway, after messing with this for two evenings in a row, I reset my smb.conf back to it’s default state and tried again with the GUI. This time I dug in a little more when I got the error. I wish I could remember it so that I could document it in case someone else hits it. The error was nonsesical. Surprise, surprise. I finally found a post on the Ubuntu forums where someone mentioned that, for whatever reason, changing “encrypt password = no” to “encrypt passwords = yes” or just commenting out that line in the smb.conf somehow cleared up the error for them. This was a crazy suggestion because the the error seemed to have absolutely NOTHING to do with this, and the poster in the forums even acknowledged the craziness of it, but sure enough, it worked! I could now share my data drives clear and clean with no password.

 

With the exception of Samba, setting up the NAS was straightforward. Despite my minor troubles with the Storage Pool feature of FlexRAID, I’m quite pleased with it as a data protection solution. It’s simple. I could, if needed, removed the drives from the NAS machine and they would be completely usable and readable anywhere else. It’s pretty much exactly what I was looking for.

I have a couple of 10/100 switches on my network, but the three machines that will be most involved in heavy reading and writing to and from this NAS are all on 1Gb lines and it shows. My buddy also has an HTPC setup (no NAS) and he uses FTP to move files from his main computer to his HTPC and I wasn’t too thrilled with the speeds; about 20Mb/s as reported by his FTP app. I’m getting about 80Mb/s with the NAS sharing my two data drives over SMB.

Next up, the (still ongoing) setup of XBMC on the client machine.

HTPC Hardware Builds

NAS

The NAS build went smoothly. The Fractal Design Arc case is very large for a mid-range tower. The drives are mounted facing left to right instead of the normal front to back. The only other case I’ve built in the past few years like this is the Antec Sonata and with that case I frequently ran into the issue of having to really bend SATA power and data cable to get them to fin in the case. There’s no such problem with the Fractal case; it’s much wider.

There’s really not much else to say about the NAS build. It was a standard ATX build in a large case. If there’s as one minor issue it’s that with a bottom-mount for the power supply, some cables had to be stretched to their limit to reach their destination.

 

XBMC

Things weren’t as easy with the XBMC box. The Apex case was quite roomy in some areas and tight in others. The first problem I ran into was with the CPU heatsink and fan. The cooling unit that came with the retail G620 CPU was pretty small, but unfortunately, not small enough. It couldn’t fit under the PSU without really tugging hard on the power supply to make room and once in place, the pressure of the PSU on top of the heatsink/fan flexed the motherboard more than I was comfortable with. To Frys we go! Luckily Frys had a decent low profile heatsink and fan ins stock. Actually, it ended up being a pretty decent unit and was almost completely silent once installed. Through a prodigious use of needle nose pliers, I was finally able to get all of the cables installed that connect the PSU and case to the motherboard.

The second problem was the case fan. Recall that I had based my build very closely on a recommendation from the XBMC forums. This recommendation called for a case fan, only I couldn’t figure out where such a fan should go. Fortunately, the forums came to the rescue again.

A couple of other notes:

• The OCZ Velocity Plus SSD drive wasn’t nearly as fast as I thought it should be. Admittedly, it’s on the lower end of the SSD range to start with, but it it still seems more sluggish than I expected. Nevertheless, it works as a decent boot drive.
• The Asus GT 430 fits… barely, but it does fit. The distance between the heatsink on the video card and the case wall is only a millimeter or two, but they aren’t actually touching.
• I needed a pair of long needle nose pliers to put in some of the cables once the motherboard was mounted in the case.

Overall both machines are about what I expected. Now it’s time to work on software.

Components Arrived Today

Most of my NAS and HTPC components arrived today. I’m only missing the NAS case. A few impressions:

• The Apex case and mini-ITX motherboard were both much bigger than I thought they would be. This is a disappointment.
• The coolers that came with the CPUs were low profile (kind of) but seemed pretty damn flimsy. I may have to get an aftermarket replacement for the G840 I’ll be putting in my HTPC client.
• The memory modules really re low profile. It’s been a while since I’ve seen shorter memory modules.
• The Apex case has something of a blemish on one of it’s shiny front panels. It’s probably not enough to make me send it back, but it definitely made me scowl when I saw it.

It will likely be the weekend before I can find the time to put these systems together. I’ll take some pictures during the build process if I run into anything interesting or especially difficult to figure out.

HTPC Hardware - Client

If you've been following along, you'll know that I'm trying XBMC as my HTPC software. The XBMC community forums has a section on dedicated to hardware for XBMC and it's quite informative.

My requirements for a client are a little odd. One one hand, I could almost get by with a very low power (both wattage and performance) setup, expect that I'd really like to use some of the fancier skins available for XBMC and those require some horsepower. I'm sure it seems odd that a skin would require more horsepower than playing back HD video, but the video playback is aided by dedicated hardware acceleration in the CPU/GPU whereas the skin animation and behavior is not.

If you don't require some of the fancier skins, then some of the prebuilt options for an XBMC client are extremely attractive. I'm all for the ultra tiny boxes, and there are quite a few options in that area. The best place to start for both retail and DIY options is a "stickied" post in the forums from a member named "eskro". The build I eventually settled on is almost identical to one of his Mini-ITX builds described here.

Case - Apex MI-100BK
I really wanted to go "small" and this was about as small as I could get without dropping to something with a "pico" power supply. I was worried that the tiny PSU's available in the smallest cases wouldn't be enough for my CPU and GPU choices. I'm not completely thrilled with this case though. It's only marginally attractive and makes compromises in the way the interior is arranged that are not necessary for a case this size. Regardless, it should meet my needs.

CPU - Intel G840
The G620 is also a viable choice but with only a $10 price difference, I couldn't see any reason not to choose the more powerful alternative. Again, I'll reiterate, if one is using their client purely to play back media, as opposed to video encoding, etc., and doesn't need to use any of the ultra fancy skins, there are less expensive and easier ways to go in terms of the CPU and motherboard. Both AMD and Intel have tiny processor/motherboard combos that are great at media playback.

Motherboard - GIGABYTE GA-H67N-USB3-B3
Again, right in lockstep with eskro's guild, I picked up the suggested motherboard. This board was quite a bit more expensive than it was listed in the guide and I seriously considered selecting a similar but less expensive option, but either the boards available to me didn't have an optical audio connector (a requirement for me) or had too many bad reviews. In the end I sucked it up and paid the premium for this board.

Memory - kingston Value Ram 4Gb (2 X 2Gb)
This is the exact same memory I'm using in the NAS. Why rock the boat. I selected it for this system for the same reasons as I did for the NAS: it's inexpensive and good quality.

HD - OCZ Vertex Plus OCZSSD2-1VTXPL60G
This was overkill for my needs. My HTPC client box won't have a spindle based hard drive in it, so I could have gone with a simple USB stick for booting, but I decided to go with a real drive intended for the purpose of normal OS usage instead of a less reliable USB stick approach. I looked at the 16, 30, and 40 Gb SSD options, and they were either using old technology or simply weren't enough less than this 60Gb drive to be worthwhile.

Case Fan - Noctua NF-P12-1300
I've been incredibly happy with Noctua case fans in my normal gaming PC builds. I've never had one fail on me and they are extremely quiet. The folks on the  XBMC forums seem to be in love with Silenx fans, but having tried several of those in the past, I have no idea why. I found them to be less polished and more noisy than Noctua. To each his own, I suppose.

GPU – Asus GTX 430
While I’m probably not going to be doing any 1080P 3D viewing any time soon, I went in this direction anyway. I’ll probably be using Linux for my client and Nvidia’s video playback acceleration seems to be the best supported and the GT430 seems to be the HTPC card of choice at the moment.

 

You can check current pricing using my shared wishlist at Newegg. The wishlist doesn’t include the GT 430, which I picked up at my local Frys on sale for $40.

HTPC Hardware - NAS

I spent a few days on the XBMC forums and elsewhere researching hardware. I want two systems: a NAS, and an HTPC client. There's definitely a viable retail approach for this hardware, but I'm proficient in DIY computer builds as well, so I needed to figure out which way to go.

 

Retail NAS

While most consumer NAS hardware is a joke and not worth the money, products from Synology and Qnap are pretty well regarded. If what you want is "just" a NAS that sips power and is always ready for your storage needs, you can't go wrong with either of those companies, I think. Unfortunately, as is usually the case when talking prebuilt vs DIY, these solutions are a little pricey. Not so much that they fall out of consideration, but still.

Frankly, if I was going pure NAS for this system, I would have probably accepted the price premiums and gone the retail route with a four bay Synology system. However...

 

DIY NAS

In my case, I wasn't this system to do more than "just" NAS. It needs to do some general server duty as well. The QNAP and Synology systems above can be modded to also do some of the server work I'd intend, but ultimately they would be limited in that regard by very low memory and processors focused primarily on data routing instead of general purposes. That leaves DIY.

The hardware for a DIY NAS wasn't too hard to come up with. I decided to  boot from either a USB stick or a small SSD. I have an SSD laying around right now doing nothing so I'll probably go that way. Then I needed a couple of big, cool, low power drives, and, of course, the normal necessities of a motherboard, processor, and memory. My choice of hardware, which I'll list below, was largely based on my desire go with as low of power as system as possible.

In the end I chose the following hardware:

Fractal Design Arc Midi Black Case 
This is a decent mid tower case with eight drive bays. I considered going small with an ITX motherboard and and case, but decided that this was going in a closet so I'd save a few bucks and get two more drive bays in the process by going with ATX and a mid tower. The small case I was considering was another Fractal Design case with six bays.

Seasonic SS-300ET 80 Plus Bronze PSU 
Seasonic has a pretty good reputation in power supplies and I wanted a 80 plus unit for it's efficiency (remember my low power goals). I’m not expert, but from what I understand, the 80% number is a measurement taken at various loads starting at 20% of their rated power, so if you're truly going for a low power system, make sure not to go overkill on PSU wattage. Although it might be fine, there's no guarantee that an 800W PSU will show good efficiency at 30-50 watts whereas a 300W PSU has been measured at 60 watts (20% of its rated 300W) and shown to be at least 80% efficient.

Intel Pentium G620 Sandy Bridge 
This is a 65W rated CPU and there is a lower power version, the G620T, but from my understanding, this lower rating only comes into play when the processors are under significant load. Under low load or at idle, both processors will perform identically with regard to power usage. Since a NAS focused system will spend 98% of time under very low load or at idle, I didn't see spending the extra money for the "T" version, and having a little extra horsepower in those situation where I'd want it, didn't seem like a bad idea either. If you're running a even smaller system that I am with a pico-PSU, then the "T" version might make more sense. As to why I didn't go with an Atom or one of the new AMD units, my understanding is that the Sandy Bridge low power systems we're just as power efficient as many Atom based systems and since I may want to use this computer for other purposed, perhaps requiring the occasional bit of horse power, I went with the full fledged processor. Again, someone on a tighter budget might make a different choice and be thrilled with their results.

ASRock H61DE/S3 Motherboard
This is the only component I went with where I might be a little shaky. This was an inexpensive LGA 1155 motherboard. It uses the Intel H61 chipset. Again, my needs for this system are very simple so I really couldn't see spending a ton of money on a motherboard heavy on features. A I'll probably be running linux, I looked around for any compatibility issues with this board or chipset and couldn't find anything earth shaking. I'll report back if I run into any issues. I suspect is will be fine.

Kingston Low Profile Value Ram 4Gb (2x2Gb) 
I've great look with Kingston memory, and these dimms were highly rated and inexpensive.

2X Hitachi Deskstar 5K300 Coolsping 2Tb Hard Drives
I may need to add another drive depending on how I choose to configure my data (Unraid, FlexRaid, or Linux software raid) for parity. We'll see. I'd like to have 4Tb of space to start with. These drives are more than fast enough for serving media and well rated in terms of temperature and power usage.

For current prices you can check my public wishlist with this configuration on Newegg.

Clearly, this processor and memory setup is far, FAR more than one would need for basic NAS duties, however I plan on having this server perform some other tasks for me. Sure most of those tasks would still not require this kind of beef, but the price difference between this configuration and something much less powerful would have been at most $100 and with very little actual power (talking wattage power here) savings to boot. So just in case I want to do something like transcoding or any other kind of heavy lifting, I decided on this route.

I have ordered the hardware listed above and it should arrive early next week. The only remaining decisions are with regards to the software. I still need to do some research there. I'll posts again once I've tried a few things and made a decision.

In my next post I'll talk about retail and DIY options for the XBMC client side. For what it's worth, nothing I could come up with on the client side hardware would be any better than eskro's research and suggestions on the XBMC forums. Everything I selected was based on his guide.

New HTPC Project

I picked up the HTPC itch again. If there was an ointment to get rif of it, I'd use that, but unfortunately the only cure is to spend a little money on equipment and countless hours fiddling with ini files and code settings. Oh well...

So my old favorite for HTPC, Sage TV, is no more. In a twist though, it wasn’t done in by failure, but by success! Google purchased the company and now the team behind it has been forced to go quiet. The forums are still up but you can't buy the software or any of the accessories (mainly extenders that let you use the software from anywhere in the house) any more. Kind of a bummer but I'm honestly happy for the guys behind the product. They really stuck with it, delivered a solid HTPC solution, and finally got their big payday.

Another difference this time around is that I don't think I'll be focusing or putting any serious time into recoding TV content from a television provider like Comcast or Dish Network. These direct PVR capabilities have, in the past, been the backbone of my HTPC efforts. What's changed is the prevalence of television content being available over the internet.

So, I'll be needing some new software. It's pretty much the same players as usual. MediaPortal, XBMC, MythTV, Windows Media Center and a million other small fries. The commercial products have mostly either been either killed, or gone unsupported (like the Sage TV example above). That's a damn shame. I have no problem paying a reasonable price for a superstar product. The only commercial one left is Media Center and while it has some fantastic addons (My Movies, for example), over all it's a mediocre solution with no networking support and a company behind it who can't make up their mind about where they want it to go.

MediaPortal would be a standout if it wasn't so unstable. Who knows, maybe the new MediaPortal2 will change their reputation.

That leaves XBMC. Fortunately, XBMC isn't just the last one standing, it's a great choice in it's own right. The one area where it's weak , and the reason why I hadn't ever considered it in the past, is its direct PVR capabilities. Fortunately, as I mentioned above, I'm not too worried about that this time.

So, we're off with XBMC at the fore!